you might be a Martian.”
“Those come down from spaceships. Listen, did Jen Beril have anything to say about the paintings? You asked her, right?”
We stopped, not for pretzels, but for gyros from the Rafiqi’s truck. Garlicky lamb, with white sauce and hot sauce, wrapped in pita—fantastic, if you can keep it from dripping on your shirt.
“I asked her,” Jack confirmed, as we made our many-napkined way down the block. “She said because it was me she’d admit she’d heard the rumors.”
“Nice to be so important,” Bill said.
“Wouldn’t it be? What’s really going on is, she’s major in antiquities and classical but she’s not a name in contemporary. If the Chaus do exist, she has zero chance of getting her hands on them—she wouldn’t know where to look and no one’s going to bring them to her. So she’s watching this action from the sidelines. Some day she might need a favor from me, so why not help me out?”
I asked, “Is it really that calculated? You guys looked like you actually liked each other.”
“What’s love got to do with it? Seriously, sure we like each other. She really would have called me to see that Jin Nong just because she knew I’d be interested, even though I can’t buy it. But if she had any chance at getting her paws on the Chaus, you’d better believe she’d have iced me faster than you can say ‘Frost Jack.’”
“You didn’t just make that up.”
“Not bad, right?”
“He’s used it before,” Bill said.
“So”—I led the descent into the subway—“having decided she could afford to be helpful, how helpful was she?”
“Hard to say. She heard the buzz at an opening last week, but she can’t remember who from. Contemporary Chinese sculpture, at Red Sky Gallery in Chelsea. We can go over there later if you want, though I’ve seen the show and it’s awful.”
“She didn’t hear it from Shayna? Right at her own front desk?”
“Interestingly, no. Possibly interestingly also,” Jack said, swiping his MetroCard, “Red Sky is a couple of ambitious, currently penniless young guys on the top floor of the same building with Baxter/Haig.”
The six train, obviously not wanting to make a liar out of me, swept in, scooped us up, and hauled us down to Astor Place. We picked our way along the student-clogged sidewalks over to Washington Square Park, where we manuevered past a steel band, a fire-eater, a mournful guitarist, and about a million dogs and their walkers to reach the nineteenth-century department store turned temple-of-learning where Dr. Yang was holed up.
Jack took us up to the fourth floor and along a hallway lined with posters of Japanese anime characters and Hong Kong movie stills. Bulletin boards held tacked-up announcements for summer study programs in Taipei, Seoul, and Ulaanbaatar. I stopped at a theater bill featuring an angry Asian woman waving a big dripping knife, for a show called
“I can’t help noticing there are no misty mountains.”
“This isn’t the art department.” Jack knocked on a door. “It’s A/P/A Studies. Asian/Pacific/American,” he expanded, ostensibly for Bill’s benefit, though I’d have had to stop and think about it, myself. “Culture in context.”
The door opened, revealing a large park-facing office with bookshelves and big windows. Behind the desk sat a tallish Asian man with brush-cut gray hair. In front of us, her hand on the doorknob, was a young, also tall, Asian woman. Her high-cheekboned face lit. “Jack! Daddy didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“Hi, Anna. He didn’t tell me you’d be here, either.” Jack and Anna exchanged a quick kiss.
“Hello, Jack,” said the man behind the desk, in a deep and Mandarin-inflected voice. He didn’t smile, just gave me and Bill a narrow-eyed glance; apparently we were another thing nobody had been told about.
I looked around. Artwork hung on the walls, divided by bookcases like battling siblings better off separated. I found a canvas of subtle gray stripes soothing, and a calligraphic scroll seemed downright antiquated until I realized the flowing ink strokes formed, not Chinese characters, but character-shaped English words. That struck me as funny, but maybe I was missing some profound point. The neon-colored oil of a garish peony in a parched desert, on the other hand, would definitely take some getting used to.
“Are you hot on the trail of something?” Anna asked Jack.
I shifted my focus from art to people in time to see Dr. Yang flash a warning look behind Anna’s back. “Not really,” Jack said. “These are friends of mine. They’re interested in new Chinese art so I thought they’d better meet Dr. Yang.”
Anna’s smile widened to include me and Bill. “Hi, I’m Anna Yang. The great man’s daughter.” We shook hands all around. “He is a great man, too,” she said. “He can be opinionated, though. But I guess that’s what people want, his opinions. Just don’t let him bully you.”
Professor Yang frowned. “I don’t bully.”
“Yes, Daddy.” As Anna Yang walked back to her father’s desk, I considered her. Her smile seemed genuine enough, but I got the feeling it wasn’t telling the whole story. Her eyes weren’t joining in. Anna kissed her father’s cheek and said to us, “Sorry I can’t stay to offer dissenting views in case you need them. Jack, I’ll see you sometime soon?”
“You have anything new? I’ll come out and take a look.”
“You mean, if I don’t, you won’t?”
“Go all the way to Flushing to see work that’s ten minutes ago? Oh, okay. Soon.”
Anna smiled and left, closing the door behind her.
At a nodded invitation from Dr. Yang, Jack and I settled into the office’s two visitor chairs, leaving Bill to lean
